By Chris Neumer

Three months ago, I hated Woody Allen and his movies with a passion I usually reserve for Barbra Streisand. I simply could not stand to look at the man, and the thought of watching more of his films appealed to me like the thought of driving a nail through my foot. My feelings of contempt toward Allen were thusly reinforced with the knowledge that these were not only my feelings, they were the popular opinion of America as well; the only person I associated with who was film saavy and viewed Allen as a great writer/director was Stumped’s editor, Jackson Casey.

Late in ’99, I entered into a discussion with him about the merits of Allen’s (supposed) 1986 triumph, Hannah and Her Sisters. After a long conversation on the matter, we agreed to rent the film and re-watch it with extra critical eyes. As the end credits rolled, Casey admitted that it wasn’t necessarily as good as he had thought the film to be, and I admitted that it was even worse than I had remembered.

As Casey steadfastly maintained that Allen was an American institution to be reckoned with (ignoring the fact that ALL of Allen’s films make their money overseas), I shook my head, instantly being told that I "just didn’t get it." And he was right. At the time, I viewed fans of Woody Allen as being members of a select group of people who would proclaim Allen’s work to be stellar, a fact that would allow the rest of America to look at them thinking, "They watched the same movie I did and somehow managed to understand it and think it was good. They must be a lot smarter than I am."

My line of thinking about Allen was influenced for good when I had the opportunity to read a scene excerpt from Allen’s 1977 Oscar winning picture, Annie Hall, in a recent issue of Premiere Magazine. To my surprise, I enjoyed the dialogue I saw on paper, and actually laughed out loud at Allen’s character’s remark that he would "like to hit [another character] on a gut level".

At first, I thought Allen was just another writer/director like Kevin Smith (Clerks, Dogma), a director whose words were a lot funnier and more enjoyable on paper. But I was wrong.

The reason I had never been attracted to or entertained by the selected works of Allen that I had seen wasn’t because of some talent deficiency on Allen’s part, it was because I genuinely didn’t like the off-screen life of the man who was writing, directing and starring in the projects. As a product of the ‘90’s, I viewed Allen as the nebbish, annoying character I constantly saw on-screen who was, additionally, having sex with and married to his own daughter. How could I like the work of a man like that?

Quite simply, these are the two biggest misconceptions about Allen that the general public has:

1) Allen’s work is somewhat biographical, and

2) Allen is carrying on an incestuous relationship with his daughter.

And, for the record, both points are distinctly false.

Allen’s work is not somewhat biographical, it is completely and totally biographical. For his part, Allen insists that is not the case. In Time Magazine, Allen stated definitively, "Movies are fiction. The plots of my movies don’t have any relationship to my life." I categorize his remarks to Time by labeling them all ‘blatant lies’. However, I can label his remarks as such, having had the benefit of reading several books on Allen’s life, including Allen’s own book, Woody Allen on Woody Allen: In Conversation with Stig Bjorkman, where Allen repeatedly contradicts his ‘movies are fiction’ mantra, with statements like:

"I don’t know the black experience well enough to really write about it with any authenticity. In fact, most of my characters are so limited locally. They’re mostly New Yorkers, kind of upper-class, educated, neurotic. It’s almost the only thing that I ever write about, because it’s almost the only thing I know."

And

"Yes, [Mia Farrow and Diane Keaton have] often been in mind when I’ve created certain characters."

Besides Allen’s real life fascination with death and masturbation ("sex with someone I love"), two topics that are quite prominent in his films, most would consider the title of Annie Hall) to be the deciding vote on this matter. Rumored to be the story of Allen and Keaton’s own off-screen relationship, Keaton’s real name was Diane Hall. Her nickname? Annie.

Allen’s relationship with Soon-Yi Previn isn’t incestuous or illegal either. While I am not stating that I would give my blessing to his marriage, it should be noted that Ms. Previn is not a) Allen’s own daughter, b) Allen’s step-daughter, or c) biologically related to Allen in any way. Ms. Previn was adopted by Farrow and Farrow alone; Allen refused to be a part of her adoption process.

However, most people don’t know this. They know what they’ve read in the tabloids, heard Farrow’s comments about Allen being a pedophile and have drawn their own conclusions and based their opinions of his work on this.

A good example of this came with a Stumped meeting to decide who would be featured on the cover. Standard logic suggested that, with a feature length story on Woody Allen, he would grace the cover. However, this suggestion was met with an alarming resistance.

"I wouldn’t pick a magazine up if it had Woody on the cover," Stumped’s assistant editor Jake Lever said. And based on the feelings of several other Stumped employees and friends, we decided to conduct a survey to see how many people roaming around downtown Chicago would, in fact, pick up a free magazine with Allen’s face on the cover.

The statistics were shocking. Of 35 people polled, only 3 people said they’d pick up the magazine (32 people said they’d pick up the magazine with Harrison Ford on the cover). One woman was so vehemently opposed to the idea of having Allen on the cover that she said she wouldn’t pick up the magazine ever again if it had once had Allen on the cover. The woman shook her head at the thought of Allen and muttered, "dirty old man."

Just like that, the idea was nixed. Enter Mel Gibson.

While I’m not necessarily asserting God-like status to Allen or his films, this is one American filmmaker who genuinely deserves our respect and admiration for the works of comedy he has created–his dramas are another matter. Allen has earned our respect already with films like Sleeper, Bananas, Deconstructing Harry and Annie Hall, he’s just not getting any recognition from the public because of his reputation.

Strangely enough, the older generations respect Allen a great deal more than the younger ones do, as do his industry compatriots; actors simply cannot wait to work with Allen, waiving their standard fees whenever possible to be part of a film of his. Granted this has a lot to do with the media shaping the image of Allen that the younger people have, but it also has to do with the fact that during the ‘50’s and ‘60’s, Allen had a rather meteoric rise to fame based on his accomplished comedic writing skills that garnered him quite a large following of people.

Born Allen Koenigsberg December 1, 1935 in Brooklyn, New York, Allen grew up in a working-class part of the borough, Flatbush, and attended Catholic school--a childhood not unlike young Alvy Singer’s childhood in Annie Hall.

In high school, Allen began to submit one-liners and jokes to local New York newspaper reporters for inclusion in their columns. It was at this point in his life that Allen created the pen name of Woody Allen, so that his classmates wouldn’t recognize his comedic, literary efforts. The name stuck.

Writing comedy for Guy Lombardo and Sammy Kaye among others, Allen was represented by the William Morris Agency while he was still in high school.

After graduating, Allen went to New York University where, after failing a class in film production, he decided to drop out in order to become a full-time comedy writer.

After writing material for other stand up comics, Allen’s managers convinced him that he could be even funnier and more well known writing for himself. So Allen joined the ranks of stand up comedians. By age 26, he was constantly appearing on talk shows and in the most successful comedy clubs in America.

It was during Allen’s fertile stand up career that he both created and refined his professional persona.

Like most comics, Allen found that he was able to write tighter sets when he was dealing with material that he had taken from his own life, putting a slight spin on the jokes, making it seem as if he was a merely a pawn in his own life; he stood still as life took place around him. Even then though, people claimed his material was too close to the truth for comfort, with his first wife actually suing him for defamation of character for what he said in one of his sets. On a grander scheme though, the important parts of Allen’s comic act, and humor, were established.

This idea of a central character who has things happen around him, not to him, is not original with Allen. Referred to by film scholars like Nancy Pogel as the "little-man character", this idea was first created by the silent movie stars of the teens and twenties, stars like Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd. Consistent with the theory that Allen’s earlier works (prior to Interiors) were written with this little-man idea firmly in mind is the way Allen used to write in female leads who were likable, but would also cause the main character to get into trouble, something the female stars of silent films invariably did.

Allen’s little-man persona is truly the root of his comedy success. Whether his characters are named Miles, Mickey, Alvy, or the most fitting moniker of all, Fielding Mellish, despite Allen’s determination to make his character socially beneath the rest of the characters in the script, he still managed to create a character who always has a response to every situation, quick one-liners at the appropriate moments, who inevitably gets the girl and ponders about the most interesting of topics, namely, love and death. It was in Allen’s film of the same name, Love and Death, that his character Boris says: I was walking through the woods, thinking about Christ. If he was a carpenter, I wondered what he charged for bookshelves.

As Allen grew older, the thematic elements of his films changed. In his 1979 film Interiors, a film so intrinsically boring I had trouble finishing reading the caption on the back of the video box, Allen’s career took a different path; that of the dramatic movie.

It was at this point in time that Allen lost a lot of his regular followers, fans who had been watching his movies and stand up act for 15 years. Even he admits "Not only were people annoyed at me for having the pretension to try something like this, but giving them this kind of a drama as well..."

Allen became less interested in comedy and began to investigate more thoroughly the issues of fiction vs. reality (The Purple Rose of Cairo, Deconstructing Harry) and interpersonal relationships between men and women (Hannah and her Sisters, Another Woman), something that the American MTV generation embraces as tightly as the metric system.

After Interiors, comedies did occasionally punctuate Allen’s filmography (1994’s Mighty Aphrodite and 1997’s Deconstructing Harry were truly entertaining and vintage Woody) but Allen seems to have paid his dues on the comedic circuit and moved onward.

Despite his current reticence toward the genre, like it or not, this is where Allen’s appeal lies. Like Jerry Seinfeld, Allen calls attention to life’s little oddities and contradictions and points them out is a well worded fashion. This is often what makes his comedies truly funny. The lack of this was what made his dramas so unpopular, like the awful Celebrity, for example.

Three months ago, I hated Woody Allen with a passion I normally reserved for Barbra Streisand. Three months later, after giving the man a second chance, I find myself on the other end of the line, an ardent Allen fan, most entertained by his shrewd comic appeal.